Seven sins and a cardinal error
Priests, and particularly missionaries, thundered from the pulpit about the need to avoid these grave offences to God and the Church, and advised the flock to examine its collective conscience to see if the Devil had managed to tempt the faithful into savouring these sinful delights.
Where are the Seven Deadlies now? In Ireland, at least, they have the honour or dishonour of serving as the names of a selection of choc ices on TV's Magnum ad.
An elegant young woman glides through the seven forbidden pleasures, extracting the maximum benefit from each in front of a huge audience.
If one requires any further evidence that we are living in a post-Christian society, there it is.
I'm surprised the well-known fundamentalist campaign groups aren't up in arms about the ad.
Or does anyone care any more about such things?
Perhaps not. It's true that Ireland has changed, that religion is no longer at the core of most people's lives.
It's also regrettably the case that some of the clergy though a minority, it should be stressed who preached about the Seven Deadly Sins were guilty of very grave sins themselves.
But I wonder how many TV viewers could name the Seven Deadlies. For the record, they are (were?) pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.
The Magnum advertising team, it seems, was a little in the dark on the subject, to judge from the ad content.
In its tongue-in-cheek send-up of the Seven Deadlies, the ad omits greed Covetousness a major sin and includes revenge, which is not one of the seven at all, and never was.
Perhaps it ought to be, but that's another day's work.
I believe envy more commonly known as jealousy to be the most poisonous of the forgotten sins.
In Othello, Shakespeare called it the "green-ey'd monster" and he knew what he was talking about.
You can achieve nothing in this life without making somebody jealous It's not so much a sin as a sickness, a cancer of the mind, and there appears to be no cure for it.
Whoever opted to include envy among the Seven Deadly Sins had his head screwed on. Fair play to him.
That's more than can be said for the genius who decided to kill off the big seven by naming choc ices after them!
John Fitzgerald,
Lr Coyne Street,
Callan,
Co. Kilkenny
